Of all the relationships that change when you have children, your relationship with sleep changes the most. For women, the ‘lack of sleep’ conditioning often starts long before the child arrives. You’re forced to find a comfortable position while sleeping on top of a balance ball that somehow gets shoved into your stomach, pinching nerves and making you feel like you’re about to pee your pants at any moment. And this balance ball, unlike the ones used for yoga, moves, kicks, and seems to find the most inopportune times to punch you in the gallbladder. From there, you wonder: is a good night’s sleep a thing of the past? Sadly, yes… yes, it is!
It’s amazing, really, how a newborn—who is believed to sleep an exuberant number of hours in a 24-hour period—becomes the constant source of your inability to sleep. When they are sleeping, you’re worried about them waking up or their breathing. Instead of sleeping yourself, you’re doing laundry, preparing bottles, or sneaking in a shower. When the tasks are done, the little one wakes up again, needing something else to eat so they can go back to sleep. And then, you’re back on the hamster wheel of parenthood.
The Ongoing Struggle for Sleep
Then, when nighttime arrives, and for some wicked reason, your baby decides that she wants to play, be held, or be rocked—or has an immature fear of the dark and starts to cry. It normally takes until dawn for her to fall back into a peaceful slumber, but by then, you’re wide awake.
Fast forward a few months, and your entire life revolves around implementing a sleep schedule that allows you to get a handle on things. You put the baby down at 7 p.m. and wait until 1 a.m. when they need to be fed. This means it’s 3 a.m. before you can finally go to bed, and by 6 a.m., your baby’s meridian cycle finally hits, and she is wide awake! So, you are too. You adjust the timing, wondering if putting the baby to bed a little earlier or later might give you more restful sleep. But it doesn’t work. And then, when the dream realization of getting your child to sleep through the night finally arrives, the sheer fact that you can sleep for a few straight hours terrifies you, so you’re up hourly checking on your baby.
This continues for a while until you decide that life would be easier if you just kept your baby in bed with you. This way, you don’t have to get up and run around like a vampire at night. Sadly, it also means sharp toenails, bony feet, fluffy hair, and snoring are lying right beside you, making it impossible to sleep for more than an hour straight. But at least you’re not getting out of bed… until your child grows bigger, steals your pillow every night, leaves you with no covers, and pushes you to the edge of the bed, where your arms go numb from lack of circulation. Now, you find yourself sleeping on the couch while your spouse and child sleep comfortably in the bed together. And then there are the occasional fevers and those crazy nights when your child throws up in bed—always at 2 a.m.
Then, your child gets older and decides they no longer want to sleep with you (thank goodness!). In fact, they no longer want to sleep at all. You hear them doing God-knows-what in their room at God-knows-what hours. The older they get, the later they stay up, and the less comfortable you feel about going to sleep while your children are still awake, no matter how tired you are. Then come the teenage years, and not only are you worried about cyberbullying and sexting, but you also fear that your child might sneak out—just like you did as a teen. There’s the music, the TV shows, and the constant worry that some punk boy or girl will be rapping at the window at all hours of the night.
Next, they start driving, and that means no sleep at all! How can any good parent sleep when they know their child is out on the roads with all those crazy drivers? So you sit up, watching the news or reruns of I Love Lucy, waiting for that creak in the garage that tells you your baby is home safe.
Eventually, they go to college. Now, you really can’t sleep. Not only are there major bills to worry about, but you also have no control over what they’re doing or who they’re doing it with. You spend many hours reliving the past 18 years, hoping and praying that you did things right. You fall asleep hoping that the phone will ring, and it will be your child calling to say goodnight. You think back to those sharp toenails and realize that you would give anything to have them back for just a moment.
And such is life. Eventually, they get married and have children of their own, giving you entirely more reasons not to sleep. Plus, all the blood pressure and thyroid medications you have to take, combined with the fact that menopause is upon you, means endless more nights that bleed into days without sleep.